We arrived in Nanjing on Thursday, May 31. In the past Nanjing used to be the capital of China. Today people still consider Nanjing the southern capital of China and Beijing the northern capital. Officially, Beijing is the capital. You can get to Nanjing from Shanghai within two hours by taking a high speed train.

Today, after being in China for five full days, I can say without a question that the Chinese hospitality is second to none. Ah, the Chinese people!! I am very impressed with them. They are very friendly, extremely helpful, highly respectful and seem to be very happy people that enjoy life. I could keep adding positive adjectives here. They are really amazing!

During this short period we’ve had chance to experiment a variety of things, from authentic Chinese food and Western food to doing sightseeing in amusement parks and historical sites.

And, of course, we’ve also kicked off our GE2 program where students from UMass Lowell are working with students from KLE Tech from Hubli, India and the local students from the Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

In the first two days of the GE2 program, we’ve attended sessions on entrepreneurship and innovation, team building and market research. We’ve been assigned into eight different groups. Right on day 1 we worked on our first activity, for that we had to leave the building. We were tasked to identify problems around the campus and then work on potential solutions. All groups delivered great presentations. Of course, our group, team 6 (AKA “The Fantastic 6” did an outstanding job! We have two members from UML, two members from NJUPT and one member from KLE. The five team mates are from different backgrounds ranging from business to HR to engineering, and this is a great configuration.

Also, we’ve been assigned projects that we will be working on for the next two weeks. Today we started working on the first version of the Business Model Canvas.

More than 10 days to go and I continue to be very excited about the program, my classmates from different countries and, of course, China!

Finally, I could not finish this blog post by including a special mention to the Chinese students who are volunteering in this program. How can they be this good? Liv, Johnson, Max, Lynn, Lemon and Wendy, THANK YOU!